Today is International Dog Day and we could fill this page with photographs of the dogs we love and tell you why they matter to us, but if you have followed Dog Desk Animal Action for any length of time you already know that. Instead, I thought today was a good opportunity to talk about something we rarely stop to explain. How we actually work for dogs in Türkiye.
What you see on social media is only a tiny part of it. You see the investigations, the dogs, the municipal announcements, the figures we question and the developments we believe people outside Türkiye need to know about. What you don’t necessarily see is everything happening behind those posts.
Dog Desk Animal Action operates within Türkiye. We are not simply watching the country from a desk in Britain and commenting on what happens there. We have dogs in our care, we work with veterinary professionals and carefully selected advocates and, where possible, we speak directly to mayors and municipalities. We have relationships on the ground right across the board from the top down and that shapes how we work, what we publish and sometimes what we decide not to publish.
There are animal welfare accounts which are very loud about what is happening in Türkiye and that is important. Awareness raising is so important. Without people documenting events, sharing footage and keeping street dogs visible, many things would never reach an international audience. But that information needs to be correct & sadly that is not always the case. We expose what is happening too but what we expose it double checked for accuracy & backed up with evidence and over time we have built a substantial evidence based record of developments affecting Türkiye’s street dogs for people outside the country trying to understand what is happening.
But we have one very simple rule. If we cannot evidence something, we do not publish it as fact.
We receive information, photographs, videos, documents, messages and allegations. Some of it is extremely distressing and some of it would travel very quickly on social media & garner a lot of attention for our organisation, but that does not automatically make it something we can publish. We are not interested in followers at any cost & we are not monetised. We check sources, look for original documents, follow municipal and government statements, examine legislation, compare figures and retain evidence. Sometimes that takes time and sometimes it means we don’t publish something at all.
We are also very careful with our words. There are animal welfare matters before the courts in Türkiye and the last thing we want to do is use language which could prejudice proceedings. We also have to tread carefully around Türkiye’s laws relating to insult when writing about public officials and institutions. None of this prevents us from asking difficult questions or publishing uncomfortable information, but it does mean we need to be able to stand behind what we say.
Most importantly, nothing we publish should make things worse for a dog or for the person trying to protect that dog.
The person who gives us information from inside Türkiye still has to live there after everybody else has stopped sharing the story. An advocate may still have to deal with the municipality involved. A person caring for dogs may depend upon relationships within their community to keep those animals safe. There are times when we know more than we publish and there are times when protecting a person, a relationship or a group of dogs is more important than having a story on our socials.
That isn’t silence. It is part of working responsibly in a country where the consequences of what we say are not experienced by us alone.
There is another misconception social media can create about our work. People see what we publish and understandably assume that publication is the work. It isn’t.
We know posts can reach a million people and create enormous awareness without changing what happens to a single dog the following morning. Awareness is important and public pressure can be extremely powerful, but it rarely produces an immediate practical result on its own. Sometimes the thing most likely to change what happens to dogs is a conversation nobody else will ever see.
We speak directly to mayors and municipalities. Not all of them want to engage with us and not every conversation leads anywhere, but some respond very favourably. When somebody who has the authority to influence what happens to dogs in their municipality is willing to talk to us, we talk to them.
Those conversations give us an opportunity to raise concerns, ask questions, understand what is happening locally and sometimes work towards something better. Those conversations are confidential and we do not publish them. The relationships depend upon trust and we take that seriously. What matters is whether that dialogue can improve outcomes for dogs, not whether it can become content for social media. Sometimes advocacy means applying public pressure and sometimes it means being able to speak directly to the people making decisions. Part of our job is understanding which approach is most likely to help the dogs.
The advocates we work with are carefully selected and that is important too. A large social media following does not automatically make somebody the right person for us to work with. We need people we can trust, people who understand their local area and the dogs within it, people who understand the difference between something they know and something they have heard and people who understand why sometimes publicity helps and sometimes it makes things considerably more difficult.
Local knowledge matters. Veterinary relationships matter. Community relationships matter and, where they can be established constructively, relationships with municipalities matter too. Animal welfare can sometimes be presented as though everybody fits neatly into groups of good people and bad people, but working on the ground is rarely that simple. If somebody responsible for dogs is willing to try to make something better, our priority is to see whether that willingness can be turned into something useful for the animals.
Alongside all of this are the dogs we work with directly. Some are in our care, including dogs who need shelter, veterinary treatment, rehabilitation or a route towards adoption, but much of our work also happens within communities. Not every dog needs to be removed from the place it knows in order to be helped. We work with dogs where they are, supporting veterinary care, sterilisation and other interventions that can improve their welfare while allowing them, where it is safe and appropriate, to remain within their community carers in their homes. This means our work can reach far beyond the number of dogs physically in our care at any one time. The approach depends on the individual dog and the circumstances around them, but the aim is the same: to find the intervention that gives that dog the best possible outcome.
Those dogs are also a constant reminder of why the wider work matters. Words such as collection, shelter capacity, population control and stray dog management sound administrative when they appear in legislation or municipal announcements. For an individual dog they describe decisions made by human beings which can determine the rest of its life.
Years of working in Türkiye have taught us that there is no single form of advocacy capable of protecting dogs. Exposure isn’t enough on its own. Neither is rescue. Neither is talking to municipalities, sterilisation, legislation or social media. They are tools and different situations require different ones.
Sometimes we expose what is happening. Sometimes we investigate. Sometimes we challenge. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we work quietly with people on the ground. Sometimes we provide veterinary care. Sometimes we give a dog somewhere safe to live. Sometimes we ask a mayor to listen and sometimes we publish something we know will make people uncomfortable. There are also times when we hold information back because publishing it would achieve very little while potentially making life more difficult for the dogs or the people protecting them. And actually for us too.
The question behind all of those decisions is the same. What gives the dogs the best chance of a better outcome?
Our Global Stray Dog Crisis Map was born, in many ways, from the lessons Türkiye taught us. Working there showed us how quickly national policy can change the lives of enormous numbers of dogs and how important it is to look beyond announcements and ask what happens afterwards.
Where did the dogs go? Who is recording them? What happens inside the shelters? How many were sterilised? How many were adopted? How many died? Who is checking and where is the data?
Eventually we started asking those questions beyond Türkiye and began seeing some of the same patterns elsewhere. Mass collection, expanding shelter systems, disputed population figures, inadequate sterilisation capacity, killing policies and missing outcome data were not issues confined to one country. That became the foundation of the Global Stray Dog Crisis Map and the international policy work which has grown around it.
Türkiye taught us to look beyond what we are told is happening and ask what actually happened to the dogs.
So on International Dog Day we wanted to tell you a little more of the work behind what you see on your timeline. We are not trying to be the loudest voice in the room & we are not trying to have the most social media followers or to go viral. We are trying to understand when we need to speak loudly, when we need to investigate, when we need to challenge, when we need to sit around a table, when somebody needs protecting and when we need to get on with helping the dog standing in front of us.
Most of that will never fit into a social media post. But that is how we work in Türkiye. And every part of it is for the dogs.